Is Facebook still down? Here’s what we know about outages impacting metaplatforms

Topline

Meta apps Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced problems on Wednesday afternoon, as thousands of people reported outages of the apps on DownDetector – although shortly after 5:30 pm EST, Meta said the problem was almost resolved.

Important facts

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Important background

Meta’s outage on Wednesday follows a global outage in March that lasted more than two hours. Meta said the outage was caused by a technical issue, Reuters reported, and affected hundreds of thousands of users. At the height of this outage, there were more than 538,000 reports of problems with Facebook and more than 91,000 problems with Instagram, The New York Times reported.

tangent

Meta’s outage follows at least two other recent technical outages. On November 25, some Microsoft platforms were unavailable for more than a day. Microsoft did not specify which change affected programs, but the outage occurred on the same day as the launch of a new Recall AI tool for Windows Insiders that was intended to take regular snapshots of computer activity. Earlier this week, on November 21, Reddit experienced two outages in 24 hours as more than 76,000 users logged reports of issues with the site and app on DownDetector.

Forbes rating

Meta is ranked 24th on the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world’s largest publicly traded companies, measured by sales, profits, assets and market value. Meta was listed in June with sales of around $142.7 billion, profits of $45.8 billion and a market value of $1.197 trillion.

Further reading

ForbesMicrosoft outages: Issues resolved more than 24 hours after Outlook affected TeamsFrom Mary Whitfill Roeloffs
ForbesUsers report Reddit outage on Thursday morning – second in 24 hoursFrom Conor Murray